Poem typeset with generous use of decorative dingbats around the edges 1880s. Dingbats are not part of the text.

A dingbat is an ornament, character, or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character often employed for the creation of box frames. The term continues to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that have symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters.

Examples of characters included in Unicode (ITC Zapf Dingbats series 100 and others):

The advent of Unicode and the universal character set it provides allowed commonly used dingbats to be given their own character codes. Although fonts claiming Unicode coverage will contain glyphs for dingbats in addition to alphabetic characters, fonts that have dingbats in place of alphabetic characters continue to be popular, primarily for ease of input. Such fonts are also sometimes known as pi fonts.[1]

The Dingbats block (U+2700–U+27BF) was added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993, with the release of version 1.1. This code block contains decorative character variants, and other marks of emphasis and non-textual symbolism. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats.

The Ornamental Dingbats block (U+1F650–U+1F67F) was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. This code block contains ornamental leaves, punctuation, and ampersands, quilt squares, and checkerboard patterns. It is a subset of dingbat fonts Webdings, Wingdings, and Wingdings 2.[5]